On Mandeville, Spinoza and the tropes of anti-Utopianism
Recently, I had great joy to provide a blurb to John Callanan’s excellent forthcoming book on Mandeville.* (I believe the working title is Man-Devil.) And while reading it I noticed the following passage in the poem that set off the epic and ever-expanding editions of The Fable of the Bees.
Then leave complaints: fools only strive
To make a great an honest hive.
T’ enjoy the world’s conveniences,
Be fam’d in war, yet live in ease,
This occurs at the start of the section with the title ‘The Moral.’ There is a stark contrast between a polity based on honesty and virtue, and a great one. A great polity has both luxury (ease of living) and martial strength. If one takes the desirability of greatness for granted, Mandeville rejects both the Christian and republican moralists as foolish here.
For some reason I had forgotten, perhaps never noticed that the position he rejects is treated as a chimerical (‘seated in the brain’) and a ‘vain Utopia.’ It is, of course, not strange that Mandeville contrasts his view with More’s Utopia. For the argument of Part II of Utopia does suggest that greatness and even living in comforts are possible without great vices. (Interestingly enough, the Utopians are permitted to practice deception in war, but many of the other great vices of civilisation are policed strongly.)
Somewhat surprisingly (recall; and here), Spinoza’s posthumous Political Treatise starts with a very similar contrast in the very first paragraph of the first chapter. The allusion to More’s Utopia is not naturally taken as a compliment:
Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, philosophers have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it. Chapter 1:1
unde factum est, ut plerumque pro Ethica Satyram scripserint, et ut nunquam Politicam conceperint, quae possit ad usum revocari, sed quae pro Chimaera haberetur, vel quae in Utopia, vel in illo Poëtarum aureo saeculo, ubi scilicet minime necesse erat, institui potuisset.
Notice the use of ‘chimera’ here, too. In fact, Hume also couples Utopia to imaginary in this very sense: “All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato, and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. The Oceana is the only valuable model of a commonwealth, that has yet been offered to the public.” Idea of a Perfect Common Wealth. One can find traces of this rhetoric (contrasting one’s own visionary proposals of federalism with Utopia and chimeras) in Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Kant’s Perpetual Peace.
What’s fun about this is that nobody really doubts Mandeville’s intensive familiarity with Spinoza, but that as Doug Den Uyl noted back in the day (here) the direct evidence for this is rather slender, and that there are intermediary sources (not the least Bayle). Mandeville mentions Spinoza and Spinozism only in (the much later) Part II of the Fable of the Bees, and there he is treated as one of his targets (and without significant detail)!
In fact, Den Uyl himself quotes the very same passage from Spinoza’s Political Treatise that I have just quoted to argue for the shared anti-Utopianism in Mandeville and Spinoza. But somehow Den Uyl overlooks the more direct allusion to More in the quoted passage in the poem.
What makes all of this so entertaining is that whatever one thinks of the proposals of part II of Utopia, part I of More’s Utopia manifestly anticipates Spinoza, Mandeville, and Hume in its alertness to mechanism design based on a realistic conception of human nature. (Arguably, if one does not believe that they read More’s Utopia, the historical intermediary is Bacon.)
*This post was triggered by reading a lovely essay by Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Daniel J. Melamed on Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise.